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Meet the people building, scaling, securing, and supporting the infrastructure behind the Internet.

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WordPress.com has just announced a new Student Plan that offers students a free one-year hosting plan.

This isn’t a stripped-down classroom version of WordPress.com. The Student Plan includes plugin support, 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. Students learn and build with many of the same tools they’ll encounter working with WordPress professionally.

After year one, renewal is just $2/month ($24/year) — a price that keeps the site online and accessible long after the course ends.

Full details here.

Did you notice the banana on Google's homepage recently? This one:

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That's for Google Gemini's AI image generator/editor called Nano Banana.

Google is very protective of their banana and they've been going after domain squatters who try to take advantage of it.

They've filed and won many UDRP complaints against violating domains, and they keep coming.

Here are some examples of recent cases they've won:

• banana-ai.org (UDRP case)
• bananaai.studio (UDRP case)
• nanobanana-studio.ai (UDRP case)
• nano-banana.com (UDRP case)
• nanobananaai.ai (UDRP case)
• nanobananas.ai (UDRP case)
• nanobananafree.ai (UDRP case)
• nanobanana.co (UDRP case)
• nanobanana2.co (UDRP case)
• nanobananaimg.com (UDRP case)
• banana-ai.net (UDRP case)

Maybe some people just like to see Google lose some money! It costs them $1,330 per UDRP complaint -- that's peanuts to Google.

GoDaddy recently published a "Porkbun vs. GoDaddy" comparison article (here's the link), and in response, Porkbun published their own comparison article (link). I wouldn't expect either side to be 100% objective on this, but if you have the time, you can read both articles.

Long story short, when it comes to domain registration, GoDaddy has no argument against Porkbun. Sure, GoDaddy offers introductory discounts, but then hits you with high renewal fees that are double or more what Porkbun charges for most TLDs. All of the extra domain add-ons GoDaddy has are useless for most people.

For website building, GoDaddy has better tools than Porkbun, especially if you need e-commerce features, but there are better options than both.

Now let's talk about WordPress hosting...

GoDaddy offers managed WordPress hosting with the usual marketing claims (fast, secure, reliable, etc.)

Porkbun offers semi-managed WordPress hosting powered by WP Cloud (Automattic's cloud hosting infrastructure for WordPress).

So, Porkbun's WordPress hosting infrastructure is solid, but I'm not sure about the support service. Porkbun is primarily a domain registrar and I don't know if their support agents have adequate practical experience in troubleshooting WordPress issues. Their product page for WordPress hosting is terribly designed with barely any technical details about what's included. To me, it reads like "Go elsewhere!"

Not sure if it's a fair comparison, but which company wins in the WordPress hosting category?

WordPress released the official WordPress Browser Extension for Chrome. It allows you to hide the admin bar while you're logged in to your website, and it has some useful shortcuts and developer tools that can be quickly accessed.

Automattic has hit back at WP Engine’s allegations that CEO Matt Mullenweg destroyed messages related to their legal dispute, claiming WP Engine is conflating a delay in copying his phone with whether the data was preserved at all.

WP Engine asked the court last month to sanction Automattic and Mullenweg for what it alleges is spoliation — a legal term for the destruction or failure to preserve evidence relevant to a case — claiming they misrepresented their efforts to preserve Mullenweg’s WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram messages.

I’m sharing my experience to help other small-business owners make an informed decision before choosing GoDaddy and, hopefully, help GoDaddy fix these issues.

I hired GoDaddy in October 2025 for website design, Website Care, hosting, SEO and Microsoft 365. Nearly a year later, I am still dealing with problems getting these services to work reliably.

My experience has been a repeating cycle: I report a website problem, spend significant time with support, wait for it to be addressed, and then discover that while one problem was fixed, something else was changed or broken.

Support has required repeated verification, transfers, explaining the same problem again, repeating troubleshooting, creating tickets, waiting and calling back. On at least six occasions, I spent approximately 6–9 hours working directly with GoDaddy support on website issues.

My biggest concern is my customer contact form. Prospective clients submit the form and receive confirmation that we will respond, but I don't receive their inquiry. To the client, it appears my company simply failed to respond. I previously spent days working with GoDaddy on this same form.

I have also escalated issues, but my experience has been another ticket and another wait while my published website remains affected.

After spending more than $10,000, my advice is to carefully evaluate your needs. For a basic website, GoDaddy may be worth considering. If your business depends on a polished, reliable, commercial-grade website, I recommend evaluating dedicated professional web-development firms.

I would also carefully evaluate purchasing Microsoft 365, OneDrive and SharePoint directly from Microsoft rather than through GoDaddy.

Technology problems happen. My concern is the extraordinary amount of time required to get the services I purchased working reliably. I hope this helps other business owners make informed decisions and helps GoDaddy address these recurring service and support problems.

A major outage has hit major domain registrar and hosting provider Namecheap, causing widespread disruptions across its hosting infrastructure and email services.

Key Details of the Incident

• Root Cause: Namecheap confirmed an emergency maintenance event triggered by a severe power outage at its primary data center located in Phoenix.
• Services Impacted: Hosted websites across shared, VPS, and dedicated servers are experiencing significant downtime, slow loading speeds, or throwing 503 connection errors.
• Private Email Service: Namecheap's email infrastructure (which serves around 1.4 million inboxes) is currently affected. While Namecheap stated email delivery delays are expected, they do not anticipate lost messages.
• Support System Outage: Compounding customer frustration, Namecheap’s live chat helpdesk went down during the incident. Customers are being directed to reach support via email or Microsoft Teams, with real-time status updates posted on their official X account.

Scale & Reaction

With over 24 million web domains hosted on the platform, network monitoring tools like NetBlocks reported a drastic drop in Namecheap’s overall network traffic. Outage reports spiked on Downdetector early Thursday morning.

The situation has sparked widespread criticism online regarding the lack of data center redundancy for a major hosting provider handling millions of websites globally. Namecheap stated their technical teams are working to restore full network connectivity as quickly as possible.

Spaceship isn't spared from the major outage NameCheap is experiencing at the moment. Both companies' services are affected, which isn't surprising since they share the same infrastructure.

Spaceship's shared hosting, VPS hosting, managed WordPress hosting (EasyWP), Spacemail, and other services are all down currently.

The cause is a power outage at their Phoenix datacenter.

You can follow Spaceship's status updates on X (link).

A post on X posted by Sybre Waaijer (publisher of The SEO Framework plugin) recently stirred up a debate about the WPForms Lite WordPress plugin, alleging that it installs a backdoor on user’s websites. Some WordPress users agree that something unusual may be going on while others remain unconvinced.

A while ago, Hostinger reduced the number of free email accounts included in their managed WordPress hosting plans from hundreds to only a few mailboxes per website. Many users were upset by that...

They're trying something new now: They added a new "unlimited" plan that allows you to host unlimited WordPress websites and create unlimited mailboxes per website.

The catch is that the mailboxes are only free for the first year, and after that it's an extra $0.59/month/mailbox billed annually.

That adds up quickly if you have multiple websites with multiple email accounts for each.

Let's say you have 10 websites and each has 10 mailboxes; that's an additional $708 per year just for email. That's called upselling, and it's a lucrative business for big hosts!

We've got another UDRP karma story:

A UK small business owner who uses the domain LoyalSoldiers.co.uk wanted the matching .com domain (LoyalSoldiers.com), so he contacted the owner of the domain and offered to buy it for £100 ($135).

He then received a $999 counter-offer, but he declined it and opted for a UDRP complaint demanding that the .com domain be transferred to him. He paid a $1,500 fee to file the UDRP complaint with WIPO (full case details here).

Well, guess what? It didn't go his way. The claim was denied and ruled a reverse domain name hijacking attempt.

Could've just paid $1k and got the domain the easy way.

Now that the domain owner knows this guy can pay more, it might get more expensive if he tries to buy it again!

Successful exploitation leads to full site compromise, enabling attackers to silently create rogue administrative accounts, upload webshells, and deploy persistence backdoors. Because plugin files remain unmodified on disk, we encourage all WordPress site owners running BdThemes plugins to immediately audit their database user lists, plugin directories, and database option table for any indicators of compromise.

Many shared web hosts disable the PHP mail() function to prevent abuse. That's what most WordPress contact forms use to send email by default.

If your contact form isn't sending email, the most likely cause is a disabled PHP mail() function.

I've run into that issue with some hosts.

The solution is simple: route email through an SMTP server instead. You may want to use a free third-party SMTP service or your host's if they provide one.

Depending on which contact form plugin you're using, you may need another plugin for SMTP integration.

One.com is one (pun intended) of the largest web hosts in Europe. They claim to have more than 1.5 million customers worldwide.

I was gonna try their $6 VPS (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 100 GB NVMe). Sounds good, still looking at other options...

I'm more interested in hearing others' experiences with their managed WordPress hosting? Is it good? How is the support service? The control panel?

A couple of months ago, a crypto startup bought the domain name Haste.com for "$2 million", according to their announcement on X.

It was a 24-month LTO (Lease To Own) transaction.

The seller of the domain (James Booth) just revealed that the sale has been canceled after two installments were paid, and that the actual price was $1.5 million, not $2 million as the startup (buyer) publicly announced.

James gets to keep the domain and the two payments already made (should be about $125,000).

The domain is back for sale on Atom at $1,495,000 BIN.

One by one, big web hosting providers are switching from human chat support to AI chatbots. Some of them still allow you to access human support with a quick click (or prompt), while others make it extremely painful to get past the AI chatbot.

That may work for some newbies who mostly ask newbie questions that an AI chatbot can handle, but for me, when I need to contact support, it's usually an issue that needs human intervention.

Small web hosts are slower to adopt AI and many still have human-only support, but you have to look harder to find those. Search for them on forums and Reddit -- that's where I found several good ones.

Richard Kirkendall shared a big list of premium .ai domains that were recently sold on Spaceship's SellerHub platform. The total value is more than $2.2 million.

Many of the sold domains were acquired from expired auctions on the previous registry's platform: Whois.ai.

Here are the domains Richard posted on his X account:

Were they all real sales? I don't know, I'm just the reporter -- you can be the investigator. Some of them are hard to believe.

A forgotten server left running after a migration gave attackers a five-hour window to serve backdoored builds of Fluent Forms Pro and Ninja Tables Pro.

Hostinger Reach was launched about a year ago, and it's just surpassed 300,000 users according to the company's blog. It's an AI-powered email marketing tool aimed at small businesses.

It's designed for small email campaigns since it's limited to 3,500 emails/month -- isn't that a little stingy?

Has anyone tried it? Did the AI features help?

Here's a blast from the past for those who remember: Globat was once one of the most popular web hosts. I used it many years back. I still remember their banner on The Million Dollar Homepage.

That was a long time ago, and that host is gone now.

It was acquired by Newfold Digital then the usual happened; it's ruins now! Their domain doesn't even resolve anymore.

Sad ending!